In 1879, Anna Haining Bates went into labor standing nearly eight feet tall. When her water broke, she lost six gallons of fluid. Her doctor soon came to a chilling realization: the baby was so large that forceps were useless. They wrapped a bandage around its neck and pulled.
What emerged was a boy weighing twenty-three pounds. He drew breath for eleven hours before dying. It was the second child Anna and her husband Martin had lost. Anna had entered the world in Nova Scotia in 1846, the third child of Scottish immigrants.
Even as a newborn, some sources suggest she weighed thirteen pounds. At four years old she topped four feet and weighed more than ninety pounds. By fifteen she stood seven feet tall and was still growing. Later analysis concluded that Anna was born with gigantism, a condition caused by a tumor on the pituitary gland that releases excessive amounts of growth hormone.
Those affected grow rapidly but often face shortened lives. Her family treated her kindly. When she outgrew her school desk, her father built a larger one by hand. He also made her an extra-large bed so she could sleep comfortably alongside her twelve siblings.
The outside world was harder to control. As word of the giant girl spread, people began visiting the family farm to catch a glimpse of her. Newspapers published stories, and one paper called her an infant giantess. The family was poor.
Anna constantly needed new clothing and shoes that were especially expensive to make. Like many farm families, they put their children to work, and Anna was no exception. She began touring local fairs as an attraction. Some accused her family of exploitation, but most historians agree they genuinely cared for her and made sure she was safe.
When not touring, Anna cared for her younger siblings, read, and pursued artistic interests, trying to have as normal a childhood as possible. She dreamed of becoming a teacher, but while staying with an aunt and attending school, the classrooms proved physically constricting, and people gawked at her constantly. The experience ended her teaching ambitions. Greater things were waiting.
In 1862, Anna moved to America and took a job at the P. T. Barnum Museum as the Nova Scotian Giantess. There she received tutoring and learned to sing and play piano.
The museum paid her twenty-three dollars a week in gold, nearly five hundred dollars in modern terms. She was provided a chaperone and allowed to earn extra income from photographs sold of her likeness. Unusually for the time, her contract let her keep the rights to those images. She performed characters like Lady Macbeth and answered audiences’ questions about her life as one of the tallest women known.
It was a largely positive experience, because for once she controlled her own story rather than simply being stared at. In 1865, Barnum’s Museum caught fire in one of the most spectacular blazes New York had ever seen. Anna, weighing nearly four hundred pounds, was trapped inside. The stairwell was ablaze and she was too large to fit through a window.
It took eighteen people carrying her to get her out. Accounts say she had helped others escape before herself, almost costing her life. Anna was known as intelligent and kind. When she met other physically unusual people on tour, she formed deep and lasting friendships.
In 1863, while touring in Europe, she met Queen Victoria, and the two became unlikely friends. Anna received numerous marriage proposals over the years, but she declined them all, uncertain whether suitors were sincere or merely after her money. Then she met Martin Van Buren Bates, a man who also stood nearly eight feet tall. A promoter noticed them at a circus in Halifax, and soon both her career and love life advanced.
Anna and Martin married in London in 1871. Queen Victoria, still grieving her husband Prince Albert, took an interest in their love story. She gifted Anna a bridal gown made of one hundred meters of satin, fifty meters of lace, and embroidered orange blossoms. Rumor holds that she arranged for the wedding to take place at the Church of St.
Martin in the Fields. Anna returned to Buckingham Palace and received a diamond ring; Martin received a gold watch. The couple met with the queen at least two more times. After marrying, the couple bought a farm in Ohio and built a house to suit their unusual heights.
The main part of the structure featured tall ceilings, wider doorways, and custom-built furniture. The back part of the home was built to average size so that servants and guests would be comfortable. Anna loved animals. She disapproved of horse racing, and on her farm she took in animals retired from the circus.
In 1872, still newlyweds, Anna conceived her first child. On May 19, a baby girl weighing eighteen pounds was born dead. For six years, the couple waited. In 1879 Anna became pregnant with a son.
The labor was extremely difficult. The child was so large the doctor could not fit forceps around its head, and a bandage was placed around its neck to pull him free. He weighed twenty-three pounds and, according to Martin’s later account, looked at birth like an ordinary child of six months. He lived only eleven hours.
He received a Guinness World Record as the largest newborn ever recorded. The loss of the second child took an enormous toll. Anna fell into a deep depression and no longer wanted to tour. She withdrew from social life.
She later attempted to return to the circus but ultimately had to give it up. By the late 1870s, she and Martin chose a quieter existence. Through the spring of 1880 she spent her time solely on the farm, and the couple became more heavily involved with the Baptist Church. In 1888, after struggling with tuberculosis and thyroid issues, Anna died of heart failure during sleep, one day before her forty-second birthday.
Martin erected a monument on her grave in her honor. A year later he remarried and moved out of their Ohio home so that his average-sized second wife could be more comfortable. When Martin died in 1919, he was buried beside Anna and their baby boy. Seville, Ohio, still remembers the couple.
An exhibit dedicated to them displays artifacts and information about their life together. A museum in Halifax is dedicated specifically to Anna herself, and some of her descendants remain involved in curating and guiding tours. Throughout her life Anna was promoted as being over eight feet tall. In reality she stopped growing before reaching that mark, standing seven feet eleven inches.
The exaggeration became necessary for the attraction and lingered in newspapers despite the inaccuracy. Posters from her touring days at the British Library show her advertised as the largest woman in the world, given top billing above Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, then massive stars in London. That placement remains a reminder of the crowds Anna drew, as large as the life she lived.